[WikiEN-l] If anyone ever says Wikipedia is too deletionist

[Carcharoth]

On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 3:24 AM, Emily Monroe<bluecaliocean at me.com> wrote:
>>  Trying to hammer every peg into one of just two holes is bound to
>> cause problems.
>
> Then there's the issue of people who are inter-sexed (born with mixed
> or absent gender-specific organs, example being [[Jim Sinclair]]),
> genderfuck (intentionally ignoring gender-specific cultural
> expectations), cross-dressers, and generally anybody else who doesn't
> fit neatly into "male" or "female". This isn't a representation of
> Wikipedia, but society in general.

I've never understood this argument.

Just because a vanishingly small minority of people can't be
classified as male or female, that is a reason to not bother doing
such classifications? If that was a valid argument, many of these
information forms that people fill in wouldn't ask for your gender.
Those forms usually give a third or fourth option for those who don't
identify as male or female, so that is what Wikipedia would do as
well.

If anyone could hazard a guess at how many of the 725,635 biographies
we have where there might be a dispute over gender, that would be good
(note that for some reason that figure, from the "WikiProject
Biography" statistics, includes music groups, and also some other
"group biographies", rather than "single biographies"). But really, if
it is only a couple of hundred where the gender is disputed or not
known, then there should be no objection to classifying the others by
gender.

Carcharoth